When Coverage Turns Critical: How Shootup Media Says It Handles Bad Press

Every PR strategy eventually has to reckon with the possibility of unfavorable coverage, and Shootup Media, a Delhi-based digital growth agency, says its approach to negative or critical press for clients differs meaningfully from how it handles routine announcement pitching.

According to the company, its standard PR service is built around securing positive coverage tied to milestones such as funding rounds or product launches, but founder Maniv Romeo has said the agency also advises clients on how to respond when a story takes an unflattering angle — a customer complaint that goes public, a product failure, or scrutiny from a journalist covering a sector more skeptically. Shootup Media frames this as a smaller, less-marketed part of its digital growth agency offering rather than a standalone crisis-communications product.

Crisis communications is typically a specialized discipline within the broader PR industry, often handled by firms or consultants who focus specifically on reputation management rather than day-to-day media placement. Shootup Media has not claimed deep specialization in this area, and the company’s public materials describe its core strength as proactive placement rather than reactive crisis response, a distinction that matters for founders trying to determine whether a general-purpose agency can handle a genuinely difficult situation if one arises.

The agency, which says it has served more than 200 clients since launching roughly five years ago, says its advice to clients facing critical coverage generally emphasizes direct, factual responses over defensive statements, consistent with standard PR practice recommending transparency over denial when a story is substantively accurate. Whether Shootup Media has managed a genuine reputational crisis for a client, as opposed to routine negative feedback, is not something the company’s public materials address directly.

Founders evaluating any agency’s PR capabilities, not just this one, are generally advised by communications professionals to ask specifically about crisis-handling experience separately from routine placement work, since the skills required to secure a positive funding-round story differ meaningfully from those needed to manage a company through a public controversy.

For early-stage startups, the likelihood of facing a genuine media crisis is relatively low compared to larger, more visible companies, which may explain why an agency like Shootup Media treats the capability as a secondary offering rather than a core selling point in its broader marketing materials.

Still, even small companies increasingly face public scrutiny through channels an agency’s traditional PR playbook was not originally built to manage, including social media backlash that spreads independently of any journalist’s involvement. Shootup Media has not detailed whether its advisory work extends to social-media-driven controversies specifically, as opposed to more traditional press-based criticism originating from journalists covering a sector.

Founders who anticipate a higher likelihood of public scrutiny — companies in regulated industries, or those handling sensitive customer data, for instance — may be better served seeking a specialist crisis-communications consultant in addition to, rather than instead of, a general-purpose growth agency like Shootup Media for their day-to-day marketing needs.

Response speed matters as much as message content once a story starts circulating, since a delayed statement can read as evasive even when the underlying facts of a situation are ultimately favorable to the company involved. Whether a lean team like Shootup Media’s can mobilize quickly enough during an actual fast-moving news cycle, as opposed to routine planned announcements, has not been demonstrated publicly.

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